The exhibition presents an excerpt from each artist’s trajectory that reveals as much about the concepts behind their larger narratives as it simultaneously obscures.

In a painting from 1999, R.H. Quaytman presents us with a glimpse into the systems that would develop in later bodies of work. In Picture of Another Painting we see one of the earliest examples of the tromp l’oeil imagery of a painting in profile. This image, which refers to a painting seen in profile in a storage rack, appears repeatedly in works to come. The size of the “edge” correlates directly to dimensions of other panels from the body of work that the painting belongs to, acting as a connector to adjacent works. The concepts explored in Picture of Another Painting predate Quaytman’s use of “Chapters” which formally developed the year after it was made.

Allusions to the book are also common to Heike-Karin Föll’s output. Perched upon a table are five of the artist’s books with a series of nine corresponding drawings entitled my brain (2015), which work through the list as a form. The artist’s books are results of long-term production and selection processes linked to an affirmation of the preliminary and momentary along with the idea of ongoing rehearsals as a mode of production. With the pages pinned down, the books become unusable in an ordinary sense - there is no reading forward. This is a moment the drawings also allow for.

On an opposing wall hangs an installation by Caitlin Lonegan, a twenty-five part piece comprised of twenty four related drawings and one small painting. Whereas visitors to Lonegan’s studio have been privy to viewing the development of a single painting alongside drawings, or the development of one painting in simultaneity with other paintings, this is the first time that Lonegan reveals the information that has typically been buried within a painting alongside it as a single entity. In her drawings, we see her operating between observation, documentation improvisation, and craft, pulling from different traditions of mark-making: between intuitive improvisation in which a mark can be viewed as a document or fact, and crafted constructions in which the objects and art entities operate as illusionistic worlds. The language, imagery, colors, and spaces that sit side by side in her drawings gets folded back into successive layers of the painting it is made with, and it informs her larger body of work that develops over a longer expanse of time.

We find sharp contrast between Lonegan’s action of revealing and the piece that Frances Scholz includes in the exhibition, which deals directly with the difficulty of uncovering information. Entitled Scripted Shadows, the silver scroll containing eight drawings evolving from Scholz’s recent Amboy Cinema project is encased within a vitrine. Drawings reference imagery from the film, which counts as one of it’s many topics, the horror of not knowing. The multiple drawings, existing on a long span of UV foil allude to the materialization of film, but here Scholz presses pause between images and we, the viewer, are caught mid-frame. We are told that the scroll contains depictions of female artists dying and representations of an object portrayed in Amboy, the movie, but we are given very little evidence to support this claim. Tied to a larger network of referents and conceivably a key to understanding Scholz’s approach to painting, the scroll emanates the precious aura of a sacred text while simultaneously resisting the notion of us needing to understand it.